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Busby: please post more c1945 details.
I wonder if there a LCC map for the Haringey side of SGR as it might have the answers to what got bombed !
Key
Black - Total destruction
Purple - Damage beyond repair
Dark Red - Seriously damaged, doubtful if repairable
Light Red - Seriously damaged, repairable at cost
Orange - General blast damage, minor in nature
Yellow - Blast damage, minor in nature
Green - Clearance areas
Small circle - V2 Bomb
Large circle - V1 bomb
If you click back to Flicker you wikll find some other info as well
best thread ever...
Everything was scarce, sometimes there was plenty of something and a week later nothing more of the same was to be had. The amount issued in return for coupons was thus dependent upon the availability of whatever.
Of course there was a great deal of swapping between neighbours, if you didn't like butter you took it anyway and then a neighbour would swap it with you for rice etc. I imagine that any cakes my mum may have made were simple sponge or some other sort of dry stuff. There was certainly no Black Forest Gateau or similar. There was very little chocolate, no bananas, pineapples or other tropical fruit.
There was one sensible thing, and for that I'm still thankfull today. All schoolchildren had a 1/3 of a pint of milk each morning - right up until about 1950/51 - this was obligatory.
I went to Stroud Green School and started in the infants (ground floor) went on to the juniors (middle floor) and then to the seniors (top floor), the Headmaster was a Mr. Stephenson - we called him 'inky' because at that time 'Stephens inks' (for fountain and other pens )was sold. At school we had PE every day, every Wednesday afternoon was a sports afternoon (we went by bus (233) to a field at the foot of Ally-Pally), we went swimming once a week(walked to Hornsey Road baths and back, no heated pool - no showers) and played cricket in summer and football in winter - whatever the weather.
But we didn't learn much, most of the men teachers were still in the services or were dead, so we mainly had housewives who were stand-ins and gave general lessons such as music, geography and arithmatic. We spent years just doing £sd and never even touched the decimal system. We were in two streams; A and B. But I cannot recall one boy or girl who could not read and write when we left school. There were no fatties - except one boy whose father had a fish and chip shop on Stroud Green Road.
Rationing went on until about 1950 when a few exceptions remained.
Just before Christmas 1945 I caught scarlet fever, at that time there were no anti-biotics (TB was rife), so I was delivered wrapped in a blanket by ambulance to the Cottage Hospital in Colney Hatch lane where I stayed for 6 long weeks. It was embarrassing actually because the whole house had to be fumigated because of me and all of my personal possesions were burned. I remember my devastation at hearing how my beloved book 'Pinochio' had been taken away!
Next time - if you are interested, I'll tell you how Florence Road was converted from Gas to Electricity.
My mother, although quite young at the time, very clearly remembers the end of chocolate rationing and the large bag of Smarties that followed. Then will spend ages telling you that the different colors were different flavours then, and what they were...
My father is 71 this year and spent the war over in Twickenham with his brothers and has plenty of stories similar to yours. I am going to show him the Pathe footage next time he visits.
Tommorow then!
But reading at home was a problem - we only had gas lighting. I don't know how many houses had already been converted to electricity but the street lighting was also still gas and the lamps needed a gas- lighterman who came along on his bike every evening with a long pole, opened a window on the lamp and lit the lamp.
At home we had gaslighting in every room and each light had a 'mantle' these were sort of mushroom shaped hats which spread the light of the gas flame out. The best place to read was directly under a light although the hissing could be somewhat distracting. I had quickly 'bagged' my place which was in the corner next to the kitchen window and I could settle down for hours with a book.
I remember how exciting it was in November walking to the library after school with just the lights of the gas lamps faintly visible through the famous London fogs. Stapleton Hall Road was like a fairy tale, those houses were well lit up and out in the cold, in the fog and in the silence (in the real London fogs of the 1950s there was utter stillness) the lights of the front rooms were like beacons in the ocean.
My father was a qualified electrical engineer and had been sent to Newcastle when the war broke out instead of going into the services. Newcastle built warships and he was part of the crew installing the electrical circuits.
So, after moving to London the failing electric installations in the house became a challenge. Not only that but his hobby was making radios and later (I'll get back to this) televisions. Presumably, I can't remember, the council had already laid the electric mains in the road at some time because the road was pretty quickly fitted with electric lights and Dad's application (as a qualified eletrician) to connect the house to the mains was approved.
I had a crystal radio which I listened to in bed and there was a radio in the kitchen which was powered by an accumalator. This accu was about half the size of a car battery and just as heavy. One paid a deposit in a shop in SGR took the accu home and simply exchanged it regurlarly for a fully charged one for a few pence.
To be continued...
After the war finding a job wasn't very difficult for some people. There had been a lot of damage done, nothing had been maintained and people were keen to get back to a semblance of comfort.
Dad got a job with London Transport on the Undergound system. He worked shifts, didn't earn much but it was a start.
The open market was flooded with surplus war equipment and the people who dealt in this market were generally known as 'spivs'. If you had a little bit of money and knew where to go you could get anything. At home we had compasses, mercury switches, spectacles, ball-bearings of all sizes, altitude meters and a host of other pointless things which had more or less been thrust into dad's hands.
His need however was for electric cable suitable for carrying the load to the house. I don't know where he got it but one day it was there. There was an electrical shop in SGR down towards FP station and one in Blackstock Road, here he bought those pieces of equipment that he needed - mainly war surplus and cheap.
We're probably into 1946 now and he seconded me, a hardly eight- year-old boy to help him. The details have gone now, but I remember scratting around in the coal cellar pulling cables through walls by the light of a candle. In short he wired up the whole house so that the people below us and in the rooms above had electricity too. I'm pretty sure that this was all on the meter so shillings had to be fed into the slot to keep the lights burning. The cupboard under the stairs at the bottom was suddenly full of meters. I think the meters had been fitted by the Electricity Board which had its HQ in front of the town hall. This 'discovery' of his, that there were houses without electricity then became a second job for him and he earned himself a few bob by this means. He needed money badly because his second hobby appeared to be smoking - he was a chain smoker and smoked Senior Service, not a cheap brand such as Woodbines or CravenA.
My mother also found a job in the CravenA cigarette factory in Camden Town. This factory was/is a massive white building still in use today for something, on the left as you have passed Euston Station on the way by road to Holloway.
We children virtually ran wild. We went everywhere and in summer and especially the summer holidays there was no stopping us. Finsbury Park, the boating lake, the American gardens, the River Lea, Hampstead Heath, Spaniards Inn, Ally Pally - all our playgrounds, all reached on foot and returned from with burning hunger, tired but happy. Hobbies we had too. But they had to be free of charge - so there was stamp-collecting, football cards, model eoroplanes (made of cheap pieces of balsa wood) and the greatest of all - trainspotting.
I'll tell you more about this and the London Trams and 1947 next time.
Busby.
Thanks!